Reuchlinhaus Pforzheim hosts Ornamenta’s exhibition “Inhalatorium: on Felt and Fumes” in the spacious downstairs hall and presentation space of the jewellery museum. The presented works counterbalance the fresh air and the dormant air spa towns in the Northern Black Forest region. Similar to objects, air circulates among us, always intertwined in relational dynamics—what one person exhales, a tree may absorb, and so on, forming a continuous exchange from airplane filters to human lungs.
Philosopher Makan Fofana and curator Yasemin Keskintepe share their new audio work in a healing cave-like setting inside the institutional space. Smoking and fumes are all too often allocated to bad guys or individuals on the edge of society, especially in Western cinema and video games. Fofana and Keskintepe reset the mainstream view on shisha smoking, vapes and cigarettes in a German, English and French auditory experience where people lie down amongst depictions of works of Europe’s largest museum collection on Narguile and Mediterranean culture; the MuCEM in Marseille.
In the “Inhalatorium” exhibition visitors are also invited to interact with a large black volume that upon closer inspection turns out to be a movable felted ball that makes us reconsider how much air we share in public space. The Black Ball is a public artwork made during a series of felting workshops in the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim and rolls through fifteen different municipalities in the Northern Black Forest during the Ornamenta, guided by a group of alumni from the University of Pforzheim and artist Yvonne Dröge Wendel.